Canada: The Blockchain Wonderland
Canada is about to become a blockchain nation. The government makes the allocation of state funds via the Ethereum Blockchain transparent and participates in a programme to improve the identification of air passengers using blockchain technology. Meanwhile, one of the country's largest pension funds has set up a subsidiary to invest specifically in Ethereum.
For the crypto and block chain scene, Canada is becoming more and more a promised land. The homeland of Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin not only attracts the miners in droves, but also demonstrates that a government with open eyes can also jump on the Blockchain train itself. And this with several projects.
Get the state finances on the blockchain!
On the one hand, Canada has started a programme that uses the block chain in the most sensible way possible for the government's activities: The National Research Council makes the allocation of funding through the Ethereum Blockchain more transparent. The project of the Canadian Research Council should be exciting for anyone interested in Open Government.
Together with the Startup Bitaccess, the Authority stores and updates the agreements on the allocation of funds on the Ethereum blockchain. For this purpose, a Smart Contract has been created on the Ethereum Blockchain, which keeps an internal list of funding allocations, in which it enters the sums of money that went to which organisation and when. When the Council allocates funds, it sends a corresponding transaction to the Smart Contract, which then enters the new data in the internal list. In this way, anyone can look at the blockchain to see which projects the Council supports, and also check whether these data have remained authentic.
The list of projects documented so far on the blockchain can be found here. You can see the Smart Contract on Etherscan. io. Such a project is of course only the beginning. In the long term, it is conceivable that governments will document all income and expenditure by Smart Contract and also make the financial transaction completely transparent by means of dollar tokens, for example. The blockchain could eradicate almost any corruption in the state system, for example, by documenting tax revenues and their distribution to government bodies on the blockchain.
The project of the Canadian National Research Council is a small but important step in this direction.
Better identity control of air travelers
The North American country is also hoping to improve the identity verification of passengers using blockchain technology. To this end, it has joined a programme under the auspices of the World Economic Forum (WEF), management consultancy Accenture and the government of the Netherlands.
According to the paper published by the WEF, the "Known Traveler Digital Identity" project is intended to "radically transform the way in which the legitimisation of travellers at borders is carried out in a secure and smooth manner, and to breathe life into the idea of digital borders". The targeted identification of travellers via the blockchain is said to have several advantages: Firstly, it will "enable governments to carry out risk assessments and safety procedures with industry and travellers before the security audit, which will reduce the burden of crossing borders".
Secondly, it will make processes more fluid by providing travellers with "specific information (e. g. on biometrics, biography or travel history) to government or private sector actors, such as border crossers, car rental companies, hotels and airlines, so that they can assess risks in advance and verify identity".
Thirdly, it is intended to strengthen the control of individuals over their data, as travellers can choose what information they want to share and at what times. So you can modularize the information to your own identity and only extract individual parts instead of the whole package. This could help prevent identity theft.
How exactly the project should use the blockchain is not said. Neither should it be a private blockchain or one of the public blockchains like Ethereum. Unfortunately, this is not clear from the many big words and great diagrams of this paper, which clearly bears the signature of a consulting firm.
Therefore, it is better to switch to the third message at this point, which is perhaps the most exciting.
A pension fund wants to become Ethereum's central hub
One of Canada's largest pension funds, OMERS (Ontaria Munucipial Employees Retirement System), has recently founded a subsidiary focused on Ethereum. The company, Ethereum Capital, plans to invest 50 million Canadian dollars in the Ethereum ecosystem. The 50 million are to be obtained from investors who can buy 20 million shares at a price of 2.50 Canadian dollars each.
We believe in the long-term future of blockchain as the technology that will become the foundation of companies,"says John Ruffolo, director of OMERS' investment division. Ethereum is "one of the fundamental building blocks" of the block-chain economy. Ethereum Capital will invest both in companies working with Ethereum and in the Ether currency itself. However, this is not speculation in a currency, says Ruffolo, but in "the companies that grow on the Ethereum platform". Ether thus acts as a kind of index representing the value of all Ethereum companies.
According to one of the partners, Som Seif, Ethereum Capital is now to become the "central business hub of the Ethereum network". The fact that the pension fund of civil servants and civil servants of Ontaria is taking this step, while the Ethereum course is rapidly collapsing. But perhaps - hopefully - also forward-looking.